Some of you may remember that daily deal site Wootmarked the Viewsonic gTablet down to just $280 (twice). Amazon (Woot's parent company) has decided they'd like to do the same, so for the third time in just a few weeks, you can score the dual-core, Tegra2-rockin' tablet for only $280. Although it's sold through Amazon, the order is fulfilled by Woot.

Need a refresher on the specs? No worries, I can totally play it lazy and copy-paste what we've said before:

Comments

True, though this price is not available on the regular woot site, just the Amazon Goldbox.

Aaron Gingrich

Exactly. I thought saying that Amazon is Woot's parent company was clear enough, but apparently not. I've added a sentence saying that the order is fulfilled by Woot.

JayMonster

Actually your clarification did no such thing. Fact is ther is no "me too" angle, whether you look at woot as an indepedant subsidiary or part of Amazon, there is no "me too" to this sale. Just another opportunity to buy it cheap.

Marcelo L

If we hadn't just heard from NVidia that they aren't supporting the Harmony platform ( which the gTablet, Advent Vega, and a bunch of others are based off of ) for HoneyComb, and what's more, aren't going to be releasing the source to the drivers for developers to port over for themselves. Then this makes this tablets a dead end, now doesn't it.

I'm glad I didn't jump on the Woot-wagon the day this went on sale. I'd been watching this thing for a few months, even tried one out at a CompUsa store ( the display isn't as bad as some people say it is in Portrait Mode. Eyesight problems ? ), but I had a nagging feeling something wasn't quite right when the price suddenly dropped $100. I figure Viewsonic didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Gotta milk it while you can, huh ?

Anyway, unless NVidia steps back from it's stance to only support the Ventana platform for HoneyComb and beyond, I can't say as I could justify this tablet, not only for me, but for any friend. Friends don't let friend buy known dead-end tech.

Maybe if they dropped it down to say....$199, as a novelty, to throw off anyone wanting to purchase an Archos 70/101. But carrying a premium on price against the Archoses and slew of other Shenzen-sourced tablets running 2.1/2.2 isn't going to make the masses really snap at the chance.

Go for the Asus Transformer, it'll support Honeycomb out of the gate, and it's price point is about right for the features it delivers.

Viewsonic gTablet Rule

A lot has been read into a very short post about a Tegra development kit. I’d like to clear up a few points.

First, nothing changes in what we’re delivering to the open source community or customers. NVIDIA will continue to post the Tegra kernel to kernel.org and publish our Android code to our public git servers. Additionally, we will continue to make our BSP (codecs, GPU driver etc) available to all our hardware partners. We will continue to do this and nothing about these processes has changed.

For our partners’ Android devices, NVIDIA provides support until the hardware partner chooses to no longer support the device. So, for instance, NVIDIA will support the Xoom on all versions of Android Motorola requests until Motorola ceases to support the Xoom. The same goes for ViewSonic with the G-Tablet, Notion Ink with the Adam, Acer with the Iconia, LG with the Optimus 2X and so on.

In relation to my original reply, that was a response to a specific question about a Tegra 250 Development Kit. Given the confusion, we will work with owners of Tegra 250 Development Kits individually to determine their needs. The term "Harmony" is an internal codename for the Tegra 250 Development Kit. It is not a tablet reference design. Each shipping tablet is a custom design with varying hardware components and requires a custom OS image from the OEM who made the tablet.

Finally, while we cannot support or give out third party peripheral drivers or provide the Android 3.0 source before Google does, we do want to explore whether we can assist the open source ROM makers. We will be reaching out to them today.

Andrew Edelsten
Tegra Developer Relations
NVIDIA Corporation

Marcelo L

Sorry Andrew, but this:

"NVIDIA provides support until the hardware partner chooses to no longer support the device"

is still a pretty vague statement. I definitely encourage you to pursue avenues at your disposal that do not create conflict with your ODM's, yet still allow for the community to support the Tegra more fully. This, obviously, includes Honeycomb.

Thank you for clarifying your internal differentiation. Of course, it's understood that are several ODM's, though there are but only a few really "custom" designs out there ( Advent Vega, Malata A1xxX or zPad tablets and the subsequent zPad 2 ).

I'm sure NVidia has a good idea of what it's doing, but as a word of advice, remember who your end customers are. It's not the manufacturers. I remember a day when NVidia wasn't sitting as pretty as it is today. I remember a time not TOO long ago when NVidia was being handed it's papers by the likes of Voodoo Fx, PowerVR, a couple of others. Who changed that ( aside from your brilliant engineers ) ? One word, Andrew, customers.

The retail customer changed that. Once you showed GeForce video cards were the way to go, and later with supplying nForce chipsets to motherboard manufacturers who targeted the end consumer who was ( were, are ) tech savvy changed NVidia's fortunes. I dare say, if it weren't for the geeks jumping on the GeForce train, the story might be different for NVidia today.

Do yourself a favor, you say you're going to reach out to the "open source ROM makers" ? Come on to freenode and have a live IRC chat with the folks in #Cyanogenmod or better yet #tegratab where the real hardcore supports of TegraX products gather. Engage them openly, ask them what their concerns are, and forge some relationship that will cement the Tegra line of processors as THE mobile device core platform. Just as NVidia let happen with all the modders tweaked every last bit out of it's GeForce video cards.

Do that. We understand you can't give away 3rd party driver code, nor Honeycomb source apriori to Google releasing it to AOSP, but start the process, and the sooner the better for everyone involved.